JorgeA Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 ^^ What bothered me was that they left this audit clause in place for what supposedly is a free product (VMware Player). That suggests to me either a lack of attention to detail or a wish to retain a right of harassment, neither of which inspires much confidence in VMware's operation. If they really have no interest in or desire to audit users of their free software, then for heaven's sake take that audit clause out of the EULA for that free software. The lack of response when I inquired about it, lowered my opinion of them even further. About Microsoft, it's been a long time since I read the EULA for any of their products. But for Windows itself, I'd imagine that this Windows Genuine Advantage thing is enough for them; I haven't come across reports of Microsoft knocking at people's doors demanding to inspect their usage of Windows or the state of their license. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 Have you come across reports of VMware actually knocking on doors? I don't fault you for your judgment of their licensing quirks, but it's pretty good software from a technical perspective. I get a lot of value from it. -Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rn10950 Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 JorgeA, have you tried using the open-source VirtualBox? I use it and, except for Windows 9x, it works pretty well. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 Have you come across reports of VMware actually knocking on doors? I don't fault you for your judgment of their licensing quirks, but it's pretty good software from a technical perspective. I get a lot of value from it. -Noel Can't say that I have, but then every time I see that name in a headline my eyes go elsewhere. The bottom line for me is this: as far as I'm concerned, there's no good reason even to ask for audit rights in a license for unpaid software. (If MSFN had a "one-finger salute" emoticon, I'd be inserting it here. ) The fact that it was there showed either carelessness on management's part or a wish to keep the option for whatever unspecified reasons. And then when people inquired about it (I wasn't the only one to ask on their forum back then), they were met with deafening silence. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 JorgeA, have you tried using the open-source VirtualBox? I use it and, except for Windows 9x, it works pretty well. Thanks for the tip. If I end up going for NoelC's idea of putting Win10 in a virtual machine, I'll check them out. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 (edited) Thurrott: Windows 8 will be "the release that never happened" In a recent episode of the "What the Tech" podcast, Paul Thurrott offers a revealing analysis of the Windows 8 debacle. Start at 42:19 to get the context; make sure to catch Andrew Zarian's telling anecdote at the 43:21 mark. The "meat" starts at 44:36: PT: Microsoft knew that Windows 8 was going to be a turd, and they had to release it, they couldn't not release it. I mean, they were just going down this path. It's like the train left the station and everyone knew it was just going to be a disaster -- AZ: But there was nothing they could have done at that point? PT: Absolutely. Could you imagine if they at some last minute said, 'We're putting a halt to this'? I mean, imagine -- AZ: Yeah, but at what point[...] through the development of this -- it's not like one day they woke up and said, 'Wow, this is the worst!" PT: i don't know, you see this is the story I'd have to talk to people about, the exact details but, having talked to people, at some point between the beginning of the project and the actual release and the whole Windows RT thing and Surface... Steve Ballmer picked Stephen Sinofsky over a couple of other people who were very qualified to run Windows and he went off in this direction after Windows 7. He was making a power play to be the next CEO and there was all this kind of internal politics and all this kind of internal stuff, a lot of bridge-burning and people who didn't like it and people who really did like it because they [inaudible] to him and it just happened. AZ: OK, I'm gonna throw something out there. By all accounts a lot of people have said they knew this was going to be a disaster. If they left the Start Menu in, would that have fixed some of this? I think it would have, for a lot of people. PT: Yes, I think especially -- so if you accept -- you could do this rewriting of history with Windows[...] In other words, like imagine that the same team was still in place. Imagine they did what you just said: they made it possible to go back to the old Start Menu. Imagine they just did that -- the only concession that they made and it wasn't quite the disaster that it turned out to be, and then they evolved Windows 8 over time -- they do 8.1, they do 8.2, right, they do this thing it's sort of like Windows 10 is today but maybe not quite as radical on the PC side. They could make this claim, kind of retroactively, that "we always planned to get to this point, Windows 8 was just the first step." The problem is, the way that they did it they can't even pretend that that was the case, because it was so unilateral. It was the first version of Windows to not offer a way to go back to the old way of doing things, which is critical for your most important customers -- businesses -- because they don't want to retrain their users in how to do anything [...] and Windows 8 was a one-way street. That was fundamentally -- it says a lot about Windows 8 that that mistake is in many ways more insane than bolting a mobile operating system onto a desktop operating system. AZ: The mistake of what, not keeping -- PT: Not allowing people to go back. And by people, I really mean businesses, I mean some people would have wanted that too, but that's not as important. It's really about the businesses. [...] PT: ...People who complain about how, "Oh, they went too far and they're doing this and this," you don't understand: the very fact that they're doing this explains how bad it was... Windows 8 is going to be the release that never happened. We're just all going to pretend that it never happened. --JorgeA EDIT: typo Edited May 22, 2015 by JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 These shills (and make no mistake, that's what the people quoted still are) are making the tacit assumption that Windows 10 is NOT a one way street. It's simply a deflection of attention to the thing everyone agrees was a flop. Kind of a "have you stopped beating your Windows yet" situation. We could of course all just go on and pretend that Windows 7 was the last release that ever meant anything. I suspect that's going to happen amongst enterprises. Now, whether some successor updates to Win 10 will make it *just* attractive enough... We can't know. No one has wanted to find the Good in Darth Windows more than I, but ****, the dark side doesn't yield easily. Each new build makes me want to adopt it less and less. -Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rn10950 Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 I just updated and fired up my Windows 10 VM for the first time in about a month... Let's play a game of which Winver is the active Winver? \ The titlebars are white on both the inactive and active windows and I have not found a way to change that yet. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 The ONLY difference I can see is that the titlebar text in one window is gray and black in the other. I'm assuming that the active window is the one with the black type. Man, you could make a case that whoever's in charge at Microsoft is trying to make Windows as annoying and difficult to use as possible! --JorgeA 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 These shills (and make no mistake, that's what the people quoted still are) are making the tacit assumption that Windows 10 is NOT a one way street. It's simply a deflection of attention to the thing everyone agrees was a flop. Kind of a "have you stopped beating your Windows yet" situation. We could of course all just go on and pretend that Windows 7 was the last release that ever meant anything. I suspect that's going to happen amongst enterprises. Now, whether some successor updates to Win 10 will make it *just* attractive enough... We can't know. No one has wanted to find the Good in Darth Windows more than I, but ****, the dark side doesn't yield easily. Each new build makes me want to adopt it less and less. -Noel For me, the takeaway from the podcast conversation is the news (to me) that the folks at Microsoft actually realized that Windows 8 was a disaster in the making. I'd suspected that this must be the case, that they must have known, but this is the first time I remember seeing that theory supported by a knowledgeable source. Paul seemed to be on the verge of explaining why they couldn't just put the process on Pause, but unfortunately Andrew interrupted him with a question. Also, Thurrott's explanation for why some people supported Sinofsky didn't come out clearly in the audio; maybe someone else can figure out what he said there and tell us. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rn10950 Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 The ONLY difference I can see is that the titlebar text in one window is gray and black in the other. I'm assuming that the active window is the one with the black type. Man, you could make a case that whoever's in charge at Microsoft is trying to make Windows as annoying and difficult to use as possible! --JorgeA And compare that to my regular PC running Windows 2003: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 (edited) (said with tongue in cheek)... Why would you want to know which was is the active one? Running multiple applications so yesteryear! What's wrong with you? You're SUPPOSED to want to run just one of anything at a time! Get with the program! By the way... Two windows compared on Win 10 build 10074 running Aero Glass... Without Big Muscle's Aero Glass to help differentiate active and background windows, it's just ridiculous to try to use the desktop. Since he's promised a new version that works with Win 10 only after the actual Win 10 release, it's not going to be very pleasant testing the rest of the Win 10 preview builds. Maybe I should just stop... By the way, this "can't really tell what's active" isn't really just about border coloration. Remember way back when you could count on the window with the flashing cursor being the one you're about to type into... I can't remember the situation, but I've definitely seen flashing cursors in multiple windows simultaneously. -Noel Edited May 22, 2015 by NoelC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 (edited) My audio interpretations: >...a lot of bridge-burning and people who didn't like it and people who really did like it because they [inaudible] to him and it just happened... [inaudible] == "...they owed their career to him..." AZ says: "At the end of the day they essentially gave everything back."...then a bit later...PT says: "They got the desktop part of it right." NC says: NOT BY A FRICKING LONGSHOT. -Noel Edited May 22, 2015 by NoelC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 Thanks for filling in the gap, NoelC ! NC says: NOT BY A FRICKING LONGSHOT. Yup! And while they (sort of) returned the Start Menu, they took away even more from elsewhere in the OS, while adding stuff that we neither need nor care about. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted May 22, 2015 Share Posted May 22, 2015 -Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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